Unisys ICON

The ICON was a computer built specifically for use in schools, to fill a standard created by the Ontario education ministry. They were found widely in Ontario high schools in the mid- to late 1980s, but disappeared after that time with the widespread introduction of PCs and Apple Macintoshes. They were also known as the CEMCorp ICON, Burroughs ICON, and finally Unisys ICON as the design moved from company to company through the development process. To its users, the machine was known as the electronic beaver.

History

By the mid-1980s most high schools had computer labs of one sort or another, typically using Apple IIs or Commodore PETs. The Apple was chosen primarily due to its color graphics and wide availability of educational software, while the PET's all-in-one metal construction and "networkable" floppy disk system had obvious advantages in a classroom setting. However it was not too uncommon to find a whole range of other machines in the business classrooms, including various CP/M boxes.

At about this time the Ontario ministry of education decided to attempt to standardize their recommended machine in order to reduce maintenance costs. They eventually settled on a selection of features that they felt would the minimum required of a classroom computer, a PET-like all-in-one box with color graphics, a "real" networked drive system (including a hard drive) and a trackball for mouse-like pointing support.

In response, Robert Arn set up CEMCorp, the Canadian Educational Microprocessors Corporation, to design and build such a machine. The basic ICON design was completed using off the shelf parts, and had reached "beta quality" after just over a year. At this point Burroughs Canada was brought in to produce them. It wasn't long after this that Sperry[?] and Burroughs merged to form Unisys.

Nevertheless the machine was deployed widely in Ontario schools starting in 1984. As a school machine it was almost ideal, but the software suite available for it was never up to desired standards. Programming classes often disregarded the ICON due to its "odd" Unix nature; machines like the PET booted directly into the BASIC programming language, which is where most instructors wanted to end up anyway. The ICON did manage to find a wide following in the newly evolving "computer use" classes, where they were used to teach word proccessing and spreadsheets.

Around 1985 the ICON became the focus of a huge political debate in Ontario. In order to be able to afford what was a very advanced machine for its era, the Ministry had to give out huge subsidies; they paid $2,500 for them, and sold them back to the schools for $900. Hosts of computer-illiterate politicials and reporters complained loudly about how you could by other machines for half the cost, and eventually that IBM's new 286-based PC-AT could replace them outright. The problems became so bad that even the most ardent supporters of the system eventually gave up the fight.

Description

The ICON systems were based on a workstation/file server model, with no storage local to the workstations. Both the workstations and the servers were similar internally, based on Intel 80186 microprocessors, and connected to each other using ARCNET. Several upgrades were introduced into the ICON line over time. The CPU was upgraded to the 286 in the Series II machines, which also widely introduced color support, and the 386 in Series III.

The workstations were housed in a large wedge-shaped desktop case, with a full-sized keyboard mounted slightly left-of-center and a trackball mounted to the right. A rubber bumper-strip ran along the front edge, a precaution against a particular type of cut users sometimes got from the PET's sharp case. The EGA monitor was mounted on top on a tilt-and-swivel mount, a welcome improvement on the PET. It also included TI's voice synthisizer, originally designed for the TI-99[?], and would speak the rather confusing phrase "dhtick" when starting up. Early machines were all black, but most examples in the classroom were a more nondescript beige.

The fileserver, sometimes referred to as the LexICON, was a simple black box with an internal 10Mb hard drive and two floppy disks opening to the front. Unlike the PET's floppy system, however, users of the ICON needed to employ what were considered rather "arcane" Unix commands to copy data to the floppy from its "natural" location in the user's home directory.

Both machines ran the Unix-like QNX as their operating system, the basic portions of it embedded in ROM. To this they added a GKS[?]-based graphics system, which was intended to be used with the trackball to make interactive programs. The system did not include a standard GUI however, although one was built at least to the prototype stage by Helicon Systems[?] in Toronto and was leaked out as Ambience. A later upgrade called ICONLook improved upon this greatly and included a file manager called House, but it was apparently too slow to use realistically.

The biggest problem for the machine was a lack of software. The various Watcom programming languages were quickly ported to the system, but beyond that the educational software teachers expected were few and far between. Although the Ministry contracted for a number of applications, the market was simply too small for commercial development to be realistic.